25-May-2006 -- My wife told me last fall that she was going to a conference in Thailand in May, and asked me if I'd like to take some vacation time and join her.

I said yes, of course, and a few months later we decided to bring our daughter along as well.

So on Friday May 19th we flew from our home in Oslo via Copenhagen to Bangkok, arriving the next morning. Tone's conference lasted until Wednesday, and our flight home will leave Friday evening, so today, Thursday, was the best time for a combined confluence/bathing trip down SE along the coast to Pattaya.

We had located an english-speaking taxi driver a few days earlier and booked him as our driver for the day, so by the time we finished our breakfast Mr Leng was waiting for us.

The traffic was horrible for the first part, until we got on top of the elevated expressway that goes nearly to Chon Buri, a little over halfway to Pattaya. From then on we had no problems, the beach was OK, but the city of Pattay itself is unfortunately marred by sex tourism. We left the beach after less than an hour then started the important part of the trip: The confluence hunt!

Before leaving for Thailand I had discovered a web page with very good Garmin GPS compatible maps of the country, including very detailed maps of the capitol itself. Using a printout of this map around the confluence area, plus my GPS, we drove north on HWY 7 until we got to 13°N, then started looking for a way to cross over on the other side of the highway. We discovered the underpass used by a previous visitor a little bit too late, so we had to make a little detour north, then coming back south we hunted around a while before locating the proper road that leads almost to the point.

On our second attempt, on foot, Cathinka & I had to turn around at a distance of 310 m, but the third time we found it! On previous visits this point have looked like a development area, currently it is part of an industrial plant, posted (in Thai only :-) No Trespassing, but the main entry to the facility is just 69 m away, and by walking around the outside wall on the east side, I was able to get to within 39 m